The thoughts of an introvert nut

Reducing PDF file-size in Linux

The other day I downloaded a PDF that ended up being a whole lot bigger than I thought. A “whopping” 230MB, which is another deal compared to the 30MB PDF’s that I’m accustomed to. So how to reduce the file-size? Ghostscript to the rescue!

If you have Ghostscript installed, run the following command to reduce the file-size of your PDF:

/printer and /prepress are both the high-resolution options, which is mainly used for printing PDFs. As you might have guessed, this option gives you the biggest file-size (yes, even bigger than your mother).

The results?

1

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[jorge@(ashitaka):~/Downloads/PDF]du-h *

29Mnew_file.pdf

230Moriginal_file.pdf

What can I say. I’m a cheap bastard when it comes to storage space, no matter how low the price might be. 😉

Reading my comment again after two years, I can safely say that it was overly aggressive and rude. I have noticed the slowing down of conversion for large pdf files on my own machine, so I was stupid back then 🙂